A Department of American and Comparative Literature

Abstract

THOUGH Comparative Literature is slowly but irrefutably gaining ground in our academic curricula, most university administrations seem as yet unwilling to grant it an independent status and to establish fullfledged Departments of Comparative Literature. Instead, they usually prefer to affiliate whatever comparative courses are being taught with the Department of English and to make the latter the receptacle of a wide medley of offerings not only of classes on English composition and English literature but also of surveys of World Literature for undergraduates and of distinctly comparative courses for graduate students. This arrangement suffers from the grave disadvantage that professors of English recruited for the latter kind of work are not usually well trained in foreign literatures and that the very quality of their previous work has brought them into contact almost exclusively with English writings, so that of all teachers of literature they are the ones least acquainted with foreign tongues. In view of this fact it is only natural that they are most thoroughly familiar with English masterpieces, that in elementary surveys of World Literature they are tempted to skim over the non-English authors from Homer to Tolstoy in order to dwell on Beowulf, Chaucer or Milton, or that in a comparative course e.g. on the Renaissance they are inclined to favor Spenser and Shakespeare at the expense of Ariosto, Luther, Ronsard, Camoens or Lope de Vega. If, on the other hand, the head of an English Department, aware of such shortcomings, should decide to call in colleagues from the Classics, the French, German or Spanish Departments, he might run into certain difficulties-difficulties which are not only of a technical nature, caused by the regrettable inability of faculty members to work together because of seemingly insurmountable departmental barriers, but which may be due also to some latent feeling on the part of a professor of Greek or of Italian that English Departments should not be entrusted or overburdened with tasks which they can not handle properly. The ideal solution to all this, of course, would be the establishment of an independent Department of Comparative Literature under the direction of a trained comparatist who would coordinate the offerings of his colleagues lend-leased from the various literature departments on the campus-but as yet few university administrations have kept in step with the new internationalism of our post-war world by systematically encouraging this comparative and international approach to literature.